When Gulabrao Patil from Shiv Sena made it to the headlines for remarking that those who had ‘been MLAs for 30 years should come to my constituency and see the roads. If they are not like Hema Malini’s cheeks, then I will resign’ he was probably thinking of those millions of quotes that one comes across on the internet that compare cheeks to tomatoes, football pitches, roses, petals, and even apples. The online universe is full of sentences where breasts are paradise, tears feel like acid, and a smile could be like a tight underwear! The online world encounters lips that are like wine, a scarlet ribbon, crispy bacon, the galaxy’s edge, or like honey… the body could be like day old rice, a pill, a back road, a machine, a car, or even a temple… or eyes are compared for some or the other wayward reason to Ikea and not just an ocean poem or a pearl or a diamond bright, and even hands could be like salad tongs, a meme, or soft like a baby’s bottom. And despite all these online examples that have escaped criticism, poor Gulabrao finds himself apologizing.
This is because the minister conveniently forgot that ever since science revealed that the moon surface has craters, even road-side-Romeos dither from invoking that comparison when passing snide remarks at girls who walk by. He obviously overlooked the fact that people now live in a world where everyone believes in holding a fart when in company of other humans though forgetting that when all that pent-up flatulence is released in an empty room, even walls squirm in unexpressed displeasure. This is not to say that the roads of his constituency are displeased at the comparison. They would be, by now, fantasizing about their surface coated with expensive creams, facewashes, and hundreds of workers with tweezers in their hands pulling out whatever looks like blackheads!
But roads are not dreamers and know the whole truth about their own existence. They know intimately every tyre-tread that leaves a mark, every sticky blob of animal crap that falls with a resounding thud, every gutka infused spatter creating abstract art on their surface, and each tell-tale bump left by unthinking diggers laying water pipes for illegal connections. The minister, in his infinite wisdom, assumed that tired treads of ageing, blood vessel blotches, and puffy wrinkles are comparable to roads. It is obviously a clear case of right and left hemispheres of the minister’s brain hurriedly composing awkward poetry that led to this entire episode. Or is it just a matter of Milne terribly misquoted when he wrote about a face trying to tell ‘her things which she was glad to know’?
I am surprised why the minister chose not to compare the roads in his constituency with ice-cream. We have seen metaled surfaces melt during the long summer spells that we have in our country… or with Botox-shots that successfully hide all irregularities in the stuff used while making them… or even the road-networks in US, as did Shivraj Sigh Chauhan earlier. No one will be surprised now if this incident now prompts Shivraj to replace ‘roads of US’ with the cheeks of some woman politician from Shiv Sena. Everything is possible in the way politics and politicians in India go about winning media sympathy.
What was the minister thinking before making such a snide remark? Hema Malini is certain that he hasn’t ever ‘touched her cheek, and he looked into her eyes. He saw his whole world there,’ to quote Julia Quinn from ‘Because of Miss Bridgerton.’ All that we know is that the minister was in love with the roads in his constituency and wanted attention from the media. Ah! Now this does make the entire episode interesting, doesn’t it? He knows that getting media attention promptly needs the creation of a connection with the ruling party. He has watched the opposition do this for decades, both within and outside his own state… and now that the citizenship issue, the farm bill, pollution, vaccines hullaballoo, covid scare, and all those articles and amendments that could have served his purpose had been taken-up, he caught hold of the roads.
What next, is all I can think of now. With politicians forever creating cheeky metaphors, we know the next one isn’t going to take long.
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Arvind Passey
21 December 2021
